I have been using the Obsidian community plug-in Smart Connections since the beginning of 2024. It brings the power of Artificial Intelligence to your Obsidian vault and the notes or Personal Knowledge Management system contained within your vault.
In this post, I plan to cover what Smart Connections does, how I currently use it, and how you can set up the plugin for yourself.
What is the Obsidian Smart Connections plugin?
Obsidian Smart Connections is a community plugin for Obsidian that brings the power of artificial intelligence to your vault. It consists of two parts: Smart Connections Files and Smart Connections Chat.
Smart Connections file
Suggests which other notes in your vault are closely related to the note you are currently editing. As I mentioned in a recent blog post, the use of Artifical in A Personal Knowledge Management system is to identify other possible links between your notes.
But it will not become a replacement for me, so I am considering links first. Obsidian hosts my Personal Knowledge Management system, not the AI Personal Knowledge; its job is to assist me.
Smart Connections chat
As the name suggests, Smart Connections Chat offers chat functionality with a large language model AI. The kicker is that it has access to your notes.
You just start every question based on my notes, and it will base the answer on your notes in your vault. I have used it to lay out some of my content, and it does a damn good job. It will even tell you if you haven’t got a definitive answer to a question in the notes, but if the information is inexplicitly from other notes, it will still try to answer the question.
How smart connections work
Smart connections works by breaking down and analysing your notes into a form which allows the Large Language model to predict the next likely word in its responses or to compare similar concepts in your notes.
Smart Connections requires an Open AI account as the plug-in uses an API (Application Programming Interface) to use the Chat GPT Large Language model.
How to set up the Obsidian Smart Connections Plugin
In this section, we will take you through the steps of setting up the Obsidian Smart Connection Plugin. You use Obsidian community plug-ins at your own risk.
- Open Obsidian settings
- Select community plugin
- Turn Community plugins on
- Browse Community Plugins
- Type Smart into the search bar
- Select Smart Connections
- Click Install
You need to select a model for note embedding, block embedding, and Smart chat modes. I recommend that you play around and find the right model for you. Since a recent upgrade, I have found that only the smallest internal models really work for the embedding, but they seem to be working well.
How I use the Smart Connections plugin
I use the Smart Connections plug-in to organise my blog notes, especially when I know I have notes related to a subject. However, I didn’t use Smart Connections for this post, as I’m writing it based on my experiences, not my knowledge.
I have also used it to identify subjects about which I could write, and I’m sure it will identify weaknesses in my personal knowledge just through use.
Smart Connections has also identified missing links between notes in my Zettelkasten permanent notes on a few occasions.
Conclusion
Thank you for reading this blog post. The linked areas of our website contain more content on Personal Knowledge Management systems and Artificial Intelligence.